On April 29, 1945, elements of the U.S. Seventh Army's 42nd
and 45th divisions reached Dachau, a small town on the
outskirts of Munich, Germany. There they discovered over
30,000 men and women imprisoned in conditions so inhumane
that over 200 of them died each day from starvation and
disease. One soldier, coming upon a room filled with
corpses ready to be burned, commented that it looked "like
a maniac's woodpile."

What they saw so shocked those battle-hardened soldiers
that in less that a month they had published an official
report describing the concentration camp, detailing how it
was run, giving the personal experiences of its inmates,
and telling how it was liberated. Almost impossible to find
outside a few research libraries, that report is now a book
with all the original text and photos, plus a detailed
index, valuable additional commentary, and sketches made by
a combat artist who visited the camp the day after its
liberation. This book provides an invaluable early record
of Nazism's unspeakable crimes.

Join prisoners as the first American soldiers reach the
camp:

"Sunday, just after the noon meal, the air was unusually
still. The big field outside the compound was deserted.
Suddenly someone began running toward the gate at the
other side of the field. Others followed. The word was
shouted through the mass of gray, tired prisoners.
Americans! That word was repeated, yelled over the
shoulders in throaty Polish, in Italian, in Russian, and
Dutch and in the familiar ring of French. The first
internee was shot down as he rushed toward the gate by
the guard. Yet they kept running and shouting through
eager lips and unbelieving eyes. Americans!"

Read from a diary whose discovery meant certain
death:

"Will you ever read these pages? Each page is a source of
danger and who knows how many pages I will write, but
even if I can put down all I experience. . . . it is so
hard to hide these pages. May a good power protect them
and keep them in safety, so that one day I can give them
to you, together with the heart of stone that was wrought
for you secretly during days and days and that I wore for
a long time. Perhaps these pages will survive me, and
some stranger will bring them to you. . . .

Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the
Scientifically Organized Society
by G. K. Chesterton.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, an idea
became all too fashionable among those who feel that it is
their right to set social trends. Wealthy families took it
on as a pet cause, generously bankrolling its research.
The New York Times praised it as a wonderful "new
science." Scientists, such as the brilliant plant
biologist, Luther Burbank, praised it unashamedly.
Educators as prominent as Charles Elliot, President of
Harvard University, promoted it as a solution to social
ills. America's public schools did their part. In the
1920s, almost three-fourths of high school social science
textbooks taught its principles. Not to be outdone, judges
and physicians called for those principles to be enshrined
into law. Congress agree, passing the 1924 immigration law
to exclude from American shores the people of Eastern and
Southern Europe that the idea branded as inferior. In 1927,
the U. S. Supreme Court joined the chorus, ruling by a
lopsided vote of 8 to 1 that the forced sterilization of
men and women was constitutional.

That idea was eugenics and in the English-speaking world it
had virtually no critics among the "chattering classes."
When he wrote this book, Chesterton stood virtually alone
against the intellectual world of his day. Yet to his great
credit, he showed no sign of being intimidated by the
prestige of his foes. On the contrary, he thunders against
eugenics, ranking it one of the great evils of modern
society. And, in perhaps one of the most chillingly
accurate prophecies of the century, he warns that the ideas
that eugenics had unleashed were likely to bear bitter
fruit in another nation. That nation was Germany, the "very
land of scientific culture from which the ideal of a
Superman had come." In fact, the very group that Nazism
tried to exterminate, Eastern European Jews, and the group
it targeted for later extermination, the Slavs, were two of
those whose biological unfitness eugenists sought so
eagerly to confirm.

As the title suggests, eugenics is not the only evil that
Chesterton blasts. Socialism gets some brilliantly worded
broadsides and Chesterton, in complete fairness, does not
spare capitalism. He also attacks the scientifically
justified regimentation that others call the "health
police." The same rationalizations that justified eugenics,
he notes, can also be used to deprive a working man of his
beer or any man of his pipe. Although it was first
published in 1922, there's a startling relevance to what
Chesterton had to say about mettlesome bureaucrats who
deprive life of its little pleasures and freedoms. His tale
about an unfortunate man fired because "his old
cherry-briar" "might set the water-works on fire" is
priceless.

That tale illustrates Chesterton's brilliant use of humor,
a knack his foes were quick to realize. In their review of
his book, Birth Control News griped, "His tendency
is reactionary, and as he succeeds in making most people
laugh, his influence in the wrong direction is
considerable. Eugenics Review was even blunter. "The
only interest in this book," they said, "is pathological.
It is a revelation of the ineptitude to which ignorance and
blind prejudice may reduce an intelligent man."

History has been far kinder to Chesterton than to his
critics. It's now generally agree that eugenics was born of
a paranoia fed by evolution and by the "ignorance and blind
prejudice" of social elites. But never forget that
Chesterton was the first to say so, condemning what many of
his peers praised.

The completely new edition of Chesterton's classic includes
almost fifty pages from the writings of Chesterton's
opponents to illustrate just how accurate his attacks on
eugenists were. For researchers, it also includes a
detailed 13-page index.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through
government is Science. The thing that really does use the
secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is
levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that
really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed
that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues,
and spread not by pilgrims but by policeman--that creed
is the great but disputed system of thought which began
with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics.

Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early
Speeches of Victoria Woodhull by Victoria Woodhull
(1837-1927)

Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, Brave New World, was
fiction. Victoria Woodhull's Brave New World was to be
terrifyingly real.

As the first female Wall Street brokers, Victoria Woodhull
and her sister Tennie had reputations to protect. They
fretted about Tennie's well-publicized remark, "Many of the
best men in [Wall] Street know my power. Commodore
Vanderbilt knows my power." She had meant her skill as a
fortune teller, but the press quite rightly picked up hints
the attractive pair traded sexual favors for assistance in
their business. To make matters worse, in their magazine
the sisters had published articles promoting free love,
while distancing themselves from what was said. Taking the
offensive, Victoria moved, step by step, until in a speech
on November 20, 1871, she boldly proclaimed:

"And to those who denounce me for this I reply: 'Yes, I am
a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional, and
natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as
short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I
please, and with that right neither you nor any law can
frame any right to interfere.'"

Having come out of the closet, she had to defend that
lifestyle from those who warned that it meant social ruin.
In speeches across the country, she championed a new
society that, in its nineteenth-century context, was
remarkable similar to Huxley's 1932 classic, Brave New
World. Babies were not grown in bottles, but pregnant
women were to be treated as "laboring for society," "paid
the highest wages," and once the baby was weaned, "the
fruit of her labor will of right belong to society and she
return to her common industrial pursuits."

To critics who warned that free love meant children growing
up without parents, she replied that, "not more than one in
ten" mothers was competent, and that parents should be
replaced by the State because, "It is but one step beyond
compulsory education to the complete charge of children."
In her Brave New World, you could have all the sex you
could attract, but it would be impossible to be a genuine
parent. Victoria was among the first to call for the State
to eliminate social ills by controlling who could be a
parent.
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Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and
Writings of Victoria Woodhull by Victoria Woodhull
(1837-1927)

During the last decades of her life, Victoria Woodhull
claimed to be the first of either sex to promote eugenics
throughout the United States and Great Britain. Even more
surprising, she claimed to have been doing so in the early
1870s, three decades before the cause was taken up in
earnest by Francis Galton, the eminent scientist that
eugenists claim as their founder.

It's obvious why eugenists have adjusted their history.
Francis Galton was the respectable, well-bred,
well-educated cousin of Charles Darwin. Victoria Woodhull
was a twice-divorced woman of uncertain breeding and
limited education, a woman with a reputation for sexual and
political radicalism. Unfortunately, historians have
followed the eugenists and credited Galton rather than
Woodhull.

This book investigates Woodhull's claim and presents
evidence from her published speeches that she was right.
She was speaking on eugenics to large audiences at least as
early as 1871, and by the mid-1870s eugenics, which she
called "stirpiculture" and "scientific propagation," formed
a major part of speeches she was making across the United
States and (after 1876) in Great Britain. By his own
admission, Galton did not take up the cause until after
1900. This book includes one of her earliest speeches in
favor of eugenics, newspaper reports of speeches from the
1870s, and five easily read facsimiles of speeches that
until now were available only in a few research libraries
in the world.

Even more important, what Woodhull said about eugenics
appealed to the same two groups that would later support
Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, wealthy and
highly educated women. Her speeches and writings laid the
eugenic foundation for the forced sterilization laws passed
in over thirty states from 1907 on. When the U.S. Supreme
Court declared such laws constitutional in 1927, the New
York Times reported that Woodhull praised the decision and
said she had "advocated that fifty years ago."

Margaret Sanger was one of the most influential women of
the twentieth century and for many decades her name was a
household word. The organization she founded, Planned
Parenthood, has received hundreds of millions of dollars
from the U.S. government and draws generously from the
world's largest foundations. With close ties to similar
organizations around the world, its influence is truly
global. Yet few Americans know anything about Margaret
Sanger, the ideals to which she dedicated her life, or the
purpose for which Planned Parenthood was founded.

Unlike any previous book, this new study of Margaret Sanger
(based on original sources) takes her seriously as a
thinker and provides the definitive reference to what she
believed. It places what she said in its proper historical
context with thirty-one chapters of prologue to prepare
readers to understand the concluding twelve chapters, which
are the full text of Sanger's own best-selling 1922
classic, The Pivot of Civilization, introduced by
noted science fiction writer, H. G. Wells.

To give one example, Sanger constantly clashed with a once
influential movement that fretted about something called
'race suicide.' A typical biography of Sanger might have a
few paragraphs in which the author gives an opinion about
that movement that's likely to be only partially accurate.
This book does not leave you captive to the scholarly
fashions of today. It takes you back to the time when race
suicide was hotly debated, and lets you listen in on what
was being said. It has no less than eleven chapters quoting
extensively from all sides of that once-fierce battle. It
takes you to the first written mention of the term and
shows how the concept expanded, year by year, until it
became a weapon to alter what was being taught at elite
women's colleges and to change what was expected of
educated, professional women (the essence: more babies,
less careers). And those century-old issues still affect
how present-day feminism views the world.

These are not isolated quotes that might be taken out of
context. Each writer is allowed to argue his or her point
of view in great detail, only irrelevant distractions have
been removed. Two of these preliminary chapters are long
out-of-print articles by Sanger herself and two are by her
arch-foe in the race suicide debate, President Theodore
Roosevelt. You would have to spend weeks searching through
a large university library to find even part of what's in
this provocative book. That makes this book an excellent
resource for students with research papers to write.

Why, you ask, is that long ago clash important? That's like
asking why slavery, outlawed almost a century and a half
ago, matters to race relations. When you hear a feminist
warn of those who intend to "force motherhood" on unwilling
women, knowingly or not, she is reacting to the race
suicide. And when she complains that men simply "don't get
it" about reproductive issues, she is referring, yet again,
to an era when who was having children was an all too
public issue.

Even more important, it puts our current debate about
reproductive issues in its proper context, not as a debate
between men and women about “choice,” but
between women themselves about differing birthrates. Early
twentieth-century women from elite universities, as smug in
their sense of superiority as any modern feminist, did not
want to be forced into what Sanger blasted as a
“cradle race” with women they regarded as
inferior - chiefly immigrants from Southern and Eastern
Europe. As Sanger put it in a 1917 magazine article (quoted
in its entirety in Chapter XXVI): “The best thing
that the modern American college does for young men or
young women is to make them highly sensitized individuals,
keenly aware of their responsibility to society. They
quickly perceive that they have other duties toward the
State than procreation of the kind blindly practiced by the
immigrant from Europe. They cannot be deluded into thinking
quantity superior to quality.”

This book brings that once familar debate out of the
shadows and into the cleansing light of day. Most important
of all, it helps you to understand contemporary debates
over issues such as abortion and sex. Sanger’s goal
for the poor women she loathed and feared was to give them
plenty of sex, but make sure they had as few of their
“unfit” children as birth control technology
permitted. Today, many liberals, who’ve long praised
Sanger and what she was doing, have a similarly motivated
zeal to bring abortion to racial minorities. As one liberal
college professor put it, pointing to a young black man
nearby, “That’s why we need legalized
abortion.” The only difference between him and Sanger
was that she would point at an Italian immigrant woman with
a large family and say, “That’s why we need
birth control.”

Remarks by Sanger in The Pivot of
Civilization.

"But there is a special type of philanthropy or
benevolence, now widely advertised and advocated, both as
a federal program and as worthy of private endowment,
which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious than
any other. This concerns itself directly with the
function of maternity, and aims to supply gratis medical
and nursing facilities to slum mothers."

"On its scientific side, Eugenics suggests the
reestablishment of the balance between the fertility of
the 'fit' and the 'unfit.' The birth-rate among the
normal and healthier and finer stocks of humanity, is to
be increased by awakening among the 'fit' the realization
of the dangers of a lessened birth-rate in proportion to
the reckless breeding among the 'unfit.' . . . . But the
scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this
restraint of fecundity is due to a deliberate foresight
and is a conscious effort to elevate standards of living
for the family and the children of the responsible--and
possibly more selfish--sections of the community. The
appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for
the benefit of the nation or the race, or any other
abstraction, will fall on deaf ears."

"Our great problem is not merely to perfect machinery, to
produce superb ships, motor cars or great buildings, but
to remodel the race so that it may equal the amazing
progress we see now making in the externals of life. . .
. Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed
child, every congenitally tainted human being brought
into this world is of infinite importance to that poor
individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the
rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one
way or another for these biological and racial mistakes."